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Hired thugs

Finally, after three and a half years, my patience has snapped. I am happy to live in harmony with the slugs and bugs provided that they limit their foraging to a few leaves only – but this year they have gorged themselves. They think that the allotment is a 24 hour buffet and I am the chief Cook and Bottle-wash, there to pander to their every nutritional need.

Enough is enough. Consider the evidence:

The climbing beans are in a very sorry state

The beans should be at the top of their poles by now, but have either been munched to the ground or have had all (and I mean ALL) of their leaves devoured. Hopes for a borlotti or green bean harvest have faded.

The brassicas are a lacy mess

A month ago the brassicas looks fantastic, marvellous, luscious. Then something enjoyed a midnight feast in the brassica cage and now they’ve become a lacy mess. In particular the experimental ‘frills of hex’ kale has been reduced to its skeleton, all green leaf removed.

The bean pods are OK, but the broad bean plants have been decimated

The broad beans are actually cropping well, but the plants themselves have been shredded of all green matter. Meanwhile the chard and lettuce are covered in tell-tale green slime and even the sunflowers have got holes in their dinner-plate sized leaves.

I think there’s a variety of critters at work here. The slugs have definitely had their fill of the climbing beans and the lettuces, but the brassicas and broad beans look like they’re suffering from an infestation of some kind of flying insect, or its grubs. The damp warm weather has no doubt helped these infestations.

There’s no point stomping one’s foot and whining about pests. They are what they are, they do what they do, and the gardener has to accept the challenge. And so this week I’ve called in the help of hired thugs: nematodes. You can buy nematodes to deal with both slugs and winged insects and I’ve applied both kinds in the hope that it’s not too late. I dislike biological and chemical control methods for slugs – both are pretty violent – so hopefully one treatment alone will be enough to encourage sluggy to slope off elsewhere.

I read this week that it’s normal for gardeners to both love and loathe their gardens in equal measure, so intense is the relationship between humans and their land. That was a lightbulb moment: I’ve had low-lying anxiety for the last few months that I’m falling out of love with the allotment. The weather and the pests and the endless weeds have conspired to make it feel, well, difficult. There’s been a heck of a lot of graft with very little reward. But then yesterday the sun came out and I spent a happy hour collecting strawberries, courgettes and raspberries (the latter have established themselves from nowhere in the wilderness at the back of the greenhouse). I then spent an even happier hour podding broad beans and processing the berries into summer-scented compotes for the freezer. So there is hope.

And actually, some things are thriving.

But on the plus side, the hops are thriving this year

Unexpected bonus: raspberries have established themselves in the wilderness area

Harvest of redcurrants…

…and of strawberries

Our first broad beans

We have to wait a long time on our chilly allotment site to get good veg, but the flowers do do well. I’ve been picking sweetly-scented sweet peas for at least a month, and the calendula are now out in shades of orange, red and yellow. Matt made me a prize-specimen-display-system for my birthday, inspired by one we saw at Sissinghurst, and it’s now anointed with lion-faced blooms.

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2 thoughts on “Hired thugs”

I love reading your blogs with the lovely photos, especially as I have a plot on the other side of the stream.

So sorry about your devastating slugs and snails. I do use slug killer pellets, but only the ones containing ferric phosphate. My worst slug-affected plants are the french marigolds meant to deter aphids.